Chinese game studios Sound & Vision Media along with Yi Long Games announced that Bloody Spell, a third-person, hack-and-slash, action-RPG, will be entering into Early Access on Steam starting January 16th this week on Steam.
The game is like a clone of Koei Tecmo’s Nioh. There’s a desolate Feudal aesthetic to the design, not unlike Team Ninja’s title. There’s also a strong focus on mixing in classical Asian-mythology and imagery into the game’s design, which definitely makes it closer to the likes of Nioh than the more European-inspired designs within From Software’s Dark Souls series.
The story is about a brother and sister, Yejin and Li, who lived in the sect of Wanfa. The practicing martial artists lived peacefully for ten years, just until the Void Legion arrived and began destroying the land. Yejin’s sister is captured by the Void Legion along with the other disciples of the Wanfa, and they’re killed off one by one. This forces Yejin to to buck up and take on the Void Legion as the last remaining disciple of the Wanfa.
Yejin has the ability to tap into the Blood Spell, an ancient magical power that only he can use to restore the Earth and defeat the monsters that have ravaged the land.
The combat in Bloody Spell is also very fast-paced and completely reliant on high-impact combos and skill-based parries. You’ll have to mix and match your attacks and maintain tactical awareness of your surroundings at all times, as you’ll not only be facing off against larger-than-life enemies, but also multiple armed foes as well.
You can check out the gameplay trailer below to get an idea of what the traversal, exploration, combat system, and environmental traps are like.
The gameplay isn’t just another hack-and-slash RPG, though. Players will have a mixture of different martial-arts based weapon mechanics at their disposal, including spears, dual swords, daggers, whips, and melee attacks. You can also mix and match your attacks based on your positioning, so it changes how you’ll have to string together combos and avoid enemy attacks. There’s definitely an extra layer of strategy involved than the typical strike-roll-strike system most Dark Souls clones rely on.
The Blood Spell system is also designed to take advantage of the main character’s ability to utilize magic attacks, which vary from performing bloody executions to unleashing skills to slow down time.
Also the game features some light platforming and environmental puzzle solving as well. Visually I can’t help but think about Eidos Interactive’s Nightmare Creatures whenever I see the indoor cave system and puzzles.
The game has already been in development for two years, and only five people have been working on it, but it looks pretty good so far. The full version of Bloody Spell will feature eight large maps, new weapon types, new equipment to loot, more mobs, bosses, and enemies to encounter, new mini-games, and an online multiplayer mode.
They expect to get all of this done over the course of the next 12 months. You can look for Bloody Spell to go live in Early Access on January 16th over on the Steam store.
